The highest-scoring team in Class 4A found its footing in the second half and finished off the Riverhawks.

The Marshalltown boys’ soccer team scored six times after intermission en route to an 8-0 shellacking of Mason City in Tuesday night’s Iowa Alliance Conference North Division clash at Leonard Cole Field.

Senior midfielder Aaron Ordaz Zambrano had three goals and an assist while junior forward Angel Gomez got a hat trick as well, helping the Bobcats (8-4-1, 2-1-0) bag their fourth win in a row.

“We’ve been practicing like really hard,” said Gomez, who has eight goals this season. “I feel like practice got us moving and just forgetting the past and moving forward now. We keep going up.”

Marshalltown took a comfortable 2-0 lead into the halftime locker room after goals by Zambrano and Gomez, but it was all gas in the second half. The Bobcats outshot the Riverhawks 32-8 for the game, unofficially, with 21 attempts and 18 of them on goal in the second half. Jacob Barr made 16 saves in net for Mason City (2-6-1, 2-2-0), but was just overwhelmed by the barrage of shots and quality scoring chances.

“With Mason City, we always seem like we don’t get up for it, we play down and they’re very athletic,” MHS head coach Scott Johannes said. “They may not have the skills, but they’re always battling, so we seem to kind of overlook them.

“We wanted to have the same intensity we had last night, and it really started off well but we missed some good chances.”

MHS junior midfielder Andres Ordaz, who shared team-high goal scoring honors with Zambrano entering the night, rattled the cage for the second night in a row. His shot off the crossbar would have given the Bobcats a 4-0 lead not long after an own-goal got Marshalltown a 3-0 advantage.

The Bobcats scored five goals over the final 18:46, with goals coming from Gomez (2), Zambrano (2) and Antoni Rodriguez Torres. Ordaz, Duriaki Ramadhani and Jovani Mendoza recorded assists in the blowout win.

“We were in the (halftime) locker room saying that our body language, our energy was slacking just because we were up 2-0,” said Gomez. “I felt like we could have done better in the first half, we could have mercied them, but we still got the job done.”

Marshalltown goalkeeper Jonathan Nunez needed to make just two saves on Mason City’s eight shot attempts as the Bobcats recorded their sixth clean sheet of the season. It was the third-straight shutout for MHS as well going into Friday’s road trip to Fort Dodge.